Body Found 47 Years Ago Near Manson Murders Finally Identified

(CBSNEWS) - Los Angeles police have identified the body of a woman found stabbed 150 times in 1969 near the site of the Manson family killings as a 19-year-old from Montreal, People magazine reported Wednesday.

Police have identified the woman as Reet Jurvetson, who moved to Los Angeles from Montreal the year she was killed, according to People.

Los Angeles police Detective Luis Rivera told the magazine that investigators can't rule out that the Manson family was involved in the killing. He said the best lead police have is a man known as "John," whom Jurvetson met in Toronto before flying to Los Angeles to see him the summer of 1969.

Jurvetson's body was found Nov. 16, 1969, by a birdwatcher in dense brush off the iconic Mulholland Drive. She had been stabbed 150 times and didn't have identification.

After going unidentified for years, Jurvetson eventually became known Jane Doe No. 59. The location and timing of her killing, just a few miles away from several Manson family murders, has long fueled speculation that Jurvetson's case was connected.

Police are working to solve the murder, with Rivera saying, "No one deserves what happened to her."

"It's our job to find out who's responsible and bring them to justice," he said.

Police said they used DNA to identify Jurvetson after her sister recognized a photo posted of the young woman's body online.

The sister, Anne Jurvetson, told People that the "free-spirited and happy" teen went to Los Angeles after meeting and becoming smitten with "John."

Anne Jurvetson said her sister sent her family a postcard saying she had found an apartment and was happy but that they never heard from her again after that. Her parents never reported her missing because "they thought that she was just living her life somewhere," Anne Jurvetson said.

Eventually, she said she came to realize that her sister was probably dead.

"It is such a sad, helpless kind of feeling to always question, to never know," she said. "After all these years, we are faced with hard facts. My little sister was savagely killed."

The same jailhouse confessions that helped investigators initially connect the band of misfits living in the Panamint Mountains to the gruesome killings that terrorized Los Angeles hinted at other deaths. Manson follower Susan Atkins boasted to her cell mate on November 1, 1969, that there were "three people out in the desert that they done in." Other stories surfaced. In the absence of bodies, they were forgotten.